An Important Part of "Original" Smart Logistics —— Prospect of Lidar

Author | The Story of Science and Technology

Edit | Science Story

Simply put, lidar is a kind of sensor, which is called "the eye of the robot" and is an important sensor integrating laser, GPS positioning and inertial measurement devices. At present, its development vein is that the localization is getting closer and closer, the application scope is getting wider and wider, and the technical level is becoming more and more mature.

First, at home, gradually approaching

The localization of lidar can borrow the analogy of Mr. Ethan, an authoritative person in the industry: companies are divided into two categories: foreign and domestic, so the former side with a heavier balance is obviously foreign companies, and now the domestic companies on the other side of the balance are also increasing and have gradually balanced.

20 19 is a crucial watershed for domestic lidar enterprises, and its market application has gradually entered the actual project case.

In recent years, the wave of autonomous driving has made local lidar manufacturers gradually enter the market, and domestic industrial lidar products have gradually become a climate. In domestic smart electric vehicles, local lidar companies have appeared one after another. TuDatong has been installed on Weilai ET7, livox lidar has been selected in Tucki, and RoboSense second-generation intelligent solid-state lidar has been installed in Guangzhou Automobile Aian.

According to the data, there should be twenty or thirty domestic radar enterprises at present, such as sagitar Juchuang, Wosai Technology, Beike Tianhui, Radium Intelligence and so on. And electronic hardware giants such as DJI and Huawei and traditional auto parts giants.

At present, it can be divided into two factions, one is to develop mechanical lidar, and the other is to directly lock solid-state lidar products. In the field of high-speed autonomous driving, Jose has a high market share; In the field of low-speed autonomous driving, sagitar Juchuang is the main manufacturer.

As for DJI and Huawei, their handwriting is even more extraordinary. In August, 2020, DJI announced the realization of mass production and supply of vehicle-mounted self-driving laser radar, and the price dropped to 1,000 yuan. Huawei will carry out laser radar technology pre-research in 20 16, prototype verification in 20 17 and mass production in 2020. After years of continuous investment and experience accumulation, domestic radar enterprises have worked hard in their respective market segments, showing a market pattern of blooming flowers.

The purchase cost of imported lidar is high, so the low cost of domestic lidar is the starting point for its market occupation and an important driving force for domestic substitution. To put it bluntly, the price should be low.

In today's era when cost is king, high-priced radar has never been the choice of mainstream market. Especially in the application of L3 autopilot, the high cost of foreign radar is still the biggest obstacle to its landing, so it is imperative for domestic radar to realize import substitution.

In the past, lidar needed tens of thousands of dollars. At present, domestic radars with hundreds of dollars are gradually mass-produced. Of course, many practical problems such as cost reduction space and mass production maturity are still in front of domestic enterprises, and truly mature available resources are still scarce. In the next 2-3 years, the function of domestic lidar still needs to face many challenges.

In addition, compared with imported radars, domestic enterprises have more advantages in terms of timeliness of supply, customization of functions, coordination of services and rationality of channels. Especially the service, is the strength of domestic radar. Due to the short distance, convenient service, understanding of national conditions and no language barriers, generally speaking, the service quality of domestic radar is high, which can timely investigate and solve unexpected situations and ensure the stable operation of the project.

Therefore, in addition to their own technical factors, domestic radar enterprises need to cultivate comprehensive capabilities, including technology research and development system, stable supply chain and mass production capabilities, especially after-sales quality assurance capabilities.

It should be noted that due to the low price demand, some manufacturers sacrifice performance to reduce costs to meet the needs of customers. Therefore, although some low-cost lidar schemes in China are cheap, there are hidden dangers in the scene landing.

At the same time, laser radar enterprises also face the following risks: the demand is uncertain, the scale of mass production of users needs a long climb time, and as a supplier, laser radar needs a longer time to generate actual income.

It is true that overseas manufacturers of lidar have the advantages of upstream and midstream, and are ahead of domestic manufacturers in technology and customer base. However, under the opportunity of Made in China 2025, domestic manufacturers have caught up in recent years and made many breakthroughs. At present, localization is in a particularly clear period of opportunities and challenges, and it is the basic stage of import substitution of lidar.

Second, the application is getting wider and wider.

Lidar is a kind of sensor which uses laser to realize accurate ranging. In a broad sense, it can be regarded as a camera with 3D depth information. Its main applications can be divided into two categories: vehicle-mounted lidar and smart logistics lidar.

Unmanned is the most important feature of smart logistics. In the transportation and distribution of smart logistics, unmanned technologies-mobile logistics robots and unmanned express vehicles will be widely used, and their main core components are lidar.

Self-driving car is essentially a mobile four-wheeled robot, and vehicle-mounted radar is mainly used for autonomous driving or assisted driving. On the issue of autonomous driving, China car companies collectively stand on the opposite side of Tesla and support lidar navigation instead of visual navigation.

At present, some automobile manufacturers have successively or announced the installation of lidar on new cars, and the outbreak of autonomous driving industry has brought new opportunities for lidar. Many automobile brands, such as Tucki, Weilai, Polar Fox and R Auto, will bring self-driving production models equipped with laser radar.

Compared with visual SLAM, laser SLAM is the most stable and mainstream navigation mode at present, with high map accuracy and no accumulated error. Since 20 19, more and more domestic radars have been applied to customers' actual projects, not just to test the prototype in the workshop.

Because the demand for smart cars and smart logistics downstream of lidar is relatively concentrated, peer price reduction has become the norm. Therefore, enterprises must find another way, expand wider application scenarios and scope, and seek diversified markets, which has become an unchanging choice for enterprises.

In the field of smart logistics, the application scope of lidar is increasing day by day. Whether from handling to warehousing or logistics, lidar can fully cover and extend to smart ports, smart transportation, smart security, smart services, smart city governance and other fields.

In logistics scenes such as ports, lidar can ensure the accuracy of cargo grabbing and reduce the difficulty of personnel operation. In terms of transportation, lidar can help detect high-speed toll stations and ensure that passing vehicles meet the requirements. In terms of security, lidar can be the eye of all kinds of security monitoring equipment.

As a terminal sensing device, lidar has a broader application space. In addition to AGV, unmanned vehicles, autonomous driving and other emerging industries, it can also be used in traditional industries, which have stable customer demand and good price space. In the field of industrial manufacturing, the value of lidar is increasingly prominent. In the production line, the material monitoring function can be released to ensure automatic operation.

Lidar (laser detection and ranging) is an optical remote sensing technology, which is increasingly becoming a cost-effective new technology to replace traditional measurement technology (such as photogrammetry). In recent years, lidar and UAV often appear in various application fields in the form of combination boxing, which often produces the effect of 1 1 2.

The new product of lidar in France can provide end-to-end lidar survey service, and realize the design task of conventional terrain engineering, especially suitable for civil engineering, power lines, forestry and archaeological tasks.

China is also widely used in this field. Laser can penetrate the gaps of leaves and generate three-dimensional point clouds showing the crown, low vegetation and the ground. It can detect a single tree and view the vertical profile of the crown and vegetation, which can be used for forest fire prediction, forest patrol and other tasks.

Lidar UAV can also carry out water detection, ecosystem analysis, biodiversity detection, cultural relics restoration and other projects. DJI established a high-precision three-dimensional real-life model by using airborne lidar, which provided technical support for the digitization of cultural relics and historic sites and played an important role in the reconstruction of Datong Hanging Temple.

However, it should be noted that there is no general lidar architecture that can meet the needs of all different applications, and many different applications have different requirements on external volume, field of view, range resolution, power consumption and cost.

With the development of technology, lidar will exert its hands and feet in many unexpected application fields and bring us more different surprises.

Third, the technology is maturing.

Lidar technology has been developing and improving. From the single-point lidar at the beginning of laser invention to the single-line scanning lidar and the multi-line scanning lidar widely recognized in unmanned technology, to the solid-state lidar and FMCW lidar with innovative technical solutions, and the continuous development to chips and arrays in recent years, lidar has always been the representative of the development and application of emerging technologies.

As a hot new technology in recent years, lidar technology actually has great technical barriers. Technology is not only a challenge for enterprises that want to enter the market, but also a challenge for enterprises that have penetrated for many years. Whether the technology is mature or not is related to the landing application and mass production promotion. Mature technology is not only available, but also economical, suitable for different scenarios and safe enough.

In the industry, lidar navigation and visual navigation are controversial. In fact, lidar has its advantages, but how to maximize its advantages requires technical support. At present, some projects are replaced by machine vision solutions, because the lidar sensor technology is not mature.

With the development of domestic intelligent logistics, domestic enterprises that have accumulated in the field of lidar for many years will make efforts in their respective market segments, but in order to occupy more market share, they must combine their own technology accumulation, dig deep into core technologies, and make efforts in research and development to improve product quality and stability.

Breaking the limitation is an important sign of mature technology, for example, in a long and straight corridor with walls on both sides, or in a dynamic environment, it is easy to lose position only by relying on lidar. Another example is warehouse robots and lidar, which have the disadvantage of high cost and can only locate and navigate under two-dimensional maps and cannot cooperate with people.

There are many scenarios, and the technology is feasible in theory, but it is difficult to apply it on a large scale in practice. How to break this limitation requires enterprises to break through. Perhaps we can take the industrial anti-collision lidar WLR-7 18 launched by Wanji Technology as an example, which can be better applied to intelligent driving, vehicle-road coordination, outdoor inspection and other markets. Mature technology, in addition to product performance needs to meet customer requirements, but also need to consider product matching, future data application development and function upgrade and other factors.

Since its birth, the lidar industry has shown outstanding characteristics of high technical level. Judging from the current industry progress, it basically follows two clear landing routes. One is to use lidar as perceptual redundancy, to sacrifice some performance indicators while taking into account the cost, and at the same time to make up for the performance blind spots of cameras and millimeter-wave radars, and to take the lead in mass production; The other is the route of chip integration, seeking technological breakthroughs in remote sensing and greatly improving performance.

The development of lidar technology is a process of trial and error. Each lidar system usually uses different technologies, not only different light sources, but also different ranging and imaging methods. As long as we proceed from the two major directions of chip architecture and mixed solid-state laser mine, combined with the scale of the enterprise and years of accumulation, it is king to take the technical route that suits us.